Key Findings/Messages
American elections are trustworthy, conducted freely and openly with oversight from state officials, but longstanding concerns about the trustworthiness of American elections persist. Recent surveys show that U.S. citizens’ trust in elections lags behind that of voters in other similarly developed democracies like New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and Japan. While voter confidence increased from 2016 to 2020, largely due to increasing trust among Democrats, Americans’ confidence in electoral machinery has also become more polarized.
Over time, various security reforms have increased election integrity. The Progressive Era (roughly 1890-1920) saw the “greatest explosion of efforts to safeguard the lawfulness of elections and limit the influence of violence and particularism,” such as the secret ballot, government ballot printing, regulation of ballot access, widespread voter registration, prohibitions against electioneering, mechanical vote-tabulation, and publication of voter registration statistics and election returns. Since then, smaller security advances have accompanied new election technologies such as digital counting machines. The 1993 National Voter Registration Act (NVRA, a/k/a the “Motor Voter” law) and the 2002 Help America Vote Act both increased voter ID requirements, increasing security at the cost of access.
Even with these successive security increases, election administration is an institution, like the press or law enforcement, and it is vulnerable to social pressure and public criticism. In 2021, for example, many Republican-controlled state legislatures sponsored extra election audits and proposed bills to restrict voting access, keeping partisan questions about the legitimacy of the election in the public consciousness for longer than usual. Given that many states already operate their own post-election statistical sampling audit procedures, election deniers’ private audit efforts further undermined trust in the election.
Quirks in voter psychology have also reduced confidence in recent elections. Voter confidence is disproportionately dependent on their in-person experience at the polls, for example. Likewise, “confidence that one’s own vote has been counted typically outpaced confidence in the counting of the nation’s votes by approximately 40 percentage points over the past two decades.” In addition, voter confidence is consistently higher among members of the winning party, an effect especially pronounced after the 2020 election. Democrats were more confident in their own state’s tabulation than Republicans, whose confidence was especially low in states that Trump lost. Republican confidence in the 2020 election also generally correlated with the prevalence of in-person voting (as opposed to mail ballots) in each state.
Polarized religious beliefs may also contribute to starkly different levels of trust between parties. The rise of white Christian nationalism within the Republican Party suggests that many Republicans are “willing to ascribe electoral loss to the operation of malevolent supernatural forces.” Democrats, increasingly eschewing religion, are more likely to embrace scientific evidence and assurances of security from secular election authorities.
Key Recommendations Made
- “Emphasize protecting the trustworthiness of American elections, even as trust is under assault.”